Garrison Training

For this week, as a special treat (note sarcasm), I am sitting through a class on a software suite that we may end up using in country. Unfortunately, the instructor has a tendency to place the same importance on trivial details of the software as he does on significant parts of the software. He spends a lot of time explaining things that a person that is somewhat computer literate should know or reasonably be able to intuit. It's boring, but I've been told that a couple other classes I'm scheduled for will build on this one, so I do my best to pay attention.

The class has actually been kind of fun--today we learned how to use the software for tracking units. This involves creating a new little icon for your unit then placing it on a server so everyone else on the network can see where it is. The downside to this is that anyone can then move it around at their leisure. Were we to use this in country, obviously you would only move a unit to a different location if they actually called in and gave an updated PosRep, or position report. Then the appropriate authority would move that unit to the new location, and everything would be good.

What it looks like in class, though, is that everyone makes a couple units to start then starts moving everybody else's units around. I made a unit to represent Von Braun's V2 rockets and placed them on Germany, then spent the next ten minutes moving them back to Germany every time they'd get moved to the Pacific Ocean or Antarctica. I also made a unit for Sputnik and placed it over the U.S. That one actually stayed in place. Hmmm...

In our next exercise, I made an aircraft carrier and placed it off the shores of Pendleton. (The directions for the exercise said we were supposed to make a different type of unit that was nothing close to an aircraft carrier. I've been changing the exercise directions at my leisure. Why would you want to have fifteen overlays that look exactly the same? Oh, wait. This is the Marine Corps... ) Two minutes later: "Sir, you just moved my aircraft carrier to the land." "Oh, that was yours?" I moved it back to the water.

I'll try to find some fun training stories to tell over the next couple of weeks, but our training options are somewhat limited right now, so don't get your hopes up. I am working on getting both of my books ready for purchase--both my long novel that I finished before OCS, and the one I wrote for National Novel Writing Month last November--but I'm not quite there yet. Look for that post in the next couple of weeks. :-)